MVP: Bringing Your Product to Life

1. Data Management & Analytics Services WHITEPAPER MVP: Bringing Your Product to Life

2. MVP: Bringing Your Product to Life In today’s technology and experience-driven Darwinian digital era, speed is a major factor that differentiates the leaders from the laggards. To outsmart the competition, savvy businesses need to be first to the market with new but effective products and services. Businesses need to move with the shifting paradigm, moving away from slow legacy approaches to digital product development. MVP is that one approach that helps in building a product with minimum investment and enough features (which may be just a landing page) to attract the eyeballs of early-adopter customers with a single aim — to validate the product idea and get feedback early in the software development life cycle. Stage 1: Lab-based incubation of the MVP Different Approaches to Build a Data MVP for Start-ups The definition of a minimum viable product is often quite broad. It comprises various types of approaches. An app by virtue of being an MVP isn’t supposed to be a final finished product. Instead, MVPs are products that will achieve their goals by subtraction. However, even before going into the MVP stage, start with a proof of concept (POC). Assess the technical capability and the business feasibility of your concept. • Product Mock-Up MVP: Building a mock-up MVP helps businesses showcase some of the features of a future product. Developers often replace certain sophisticated automated features with easier- to-create or manually controlled solutions. MVP concierge lacks sophisticated technology and leverages Amazon Mechanical Turks to execute its functions. Wizard Of Oz also uses manual labor to replicate core functionality. However, they offer a close-to-genuine user experience. • MLP: With a focus on customer satisfaction and the minimum viability of a product, MLP is an abbreviation used for the minimum lovable product. The aim is to create such a product that creates a strong first impression and renders a memorable experience. Dropbox is an example of an MVP that became successful by incorporating user feedback. They started out with just a video demo MVP which after incorporating user feedback, allowed it to raise the necessary funds to put their product in the market and create a $12 billion behemoth. Once you are confident of your PoC, you can pick and choose different MVPs highlighted below: • No Product MVP: A no-product MVP is the code method where businesses validate an idea and receive feedback without any actual coding. Here companies count on marketing campaigns to test the opportunity in theory. The scheme only represents or explains everything in the diagram form. They use landing pages, campaigns for advertising, surveys, video explainers, blogs, etc. to push the concept to the market. It is an excellent way to kickstart a product pre-sale or raise an investment before it is built. 2

3. MVP: Bringing Your Product to Life Stage 2: Scaling up the MVP Choose the right programming language, address the bottlenecks, and leverage the cloud The goal of your MVP is to iterate quickly, trying new concepts to see what works well for your early adopters. Quick iteration and rapid deployment are more important in this concept testing phase than delivering complete features for every use case. Usage data and customer feedback on your MVP help you zero in on the keys to a successful product. Growth becomes a balancing act of keeping existing users happy and loyal with a steady stream of improvements while scaling the business model with additional audiences. Think of the roadblock, ahead of time! Your development team must think of the performance bottlenecks with your MVP and address them beforehand. This should just be 1 of the success criteria you define for them along with optimized design. The best tools and frameworks would fail in the face of poor or compromised design. When the trickle turns to a flood, keep your faith in the cloud! Once you’ve discovered the successful formula, there’s no looking back. The load on your infrastructure will be massive and scaling needs to happen instantaneously. Cloud services like AWS, Azure, and GCP help free you from capacity planning so you can focus on creating and improving your core features. When your app, website, product, or service goes viral, scale economies of cloud services improve your margins and additional usage data points you to the most meaningful enhancements to further propel your growth. Choosing the right programming language! This makes the choice of the programming language very important. Choosing a lean, efficient, and fast language allows you to scale quickly while optimizing server spends. It is also important to choose a language with a plethora of beneficial libraries to allow for fast coding. The Secret to successful products: Utilizing Telemetry Data is the key to product success or failure. Building the right data production and collection framework cannot be an afterthought of initial success. It needs to be embedded from the time of the MVP and should scale with it. For any product to be launched successfully, it is important to embrace the principles of product optimization and using the right set of communication processes to improve customer experience, quality, performance, and security. Some of the key tenets of getting telemetry right are: - development team and allows your product managers to prioritize what’s best for the users and the business. Can I find potential issues before my customers can? Products going offline or key features not working can contribute to awful customer experience driving them away. Often, these issues can be identified early using the telemetry data. If you can stop issues from occurring before they become problems for your consumers, you ensure that the focus of your customers is on your product’s value proposition and not the bugs. Google Glass was an example of an MVP that failed to go into production. While sounding wonderful and futuristic, it could not flag issues like privacy beforehand. The massive backlash due to privacy concerns and the high sticker price did the product in. What’s driving business? Product telemetry that measures usage and the customers’ interactions are great leading indicators to the product performance and overall business impact. The ability to deploy and measure the impact of differentiated feature deployments across customer groups can help to create rapid feedback loops for your 3

4. MVP: Bringing Your Product to Life What can SGA do for me? SGA’s 3 key advantages as a product development partner are around these products. From isolating the correct data producers to ensuring capture and landing of the correct data metrics, we are experts at laying the groundwork for actionable insights that help both the product and the business. Our ability to build products for our clients SGA has wide experience building data and software products for clients across sectors like BFSI, Media & Entertainment, Technology, and Manufacturing. We are equally at ease working with start-ups or fortune 500 clients giving us wide exposure to the most relevant tech stack today. Our ability to validate our clients’ product features through market research Even though telemetry can give you very deep insights into how your products are being used, you cannot measure everything or uncover every pattern. SGA’s product research has helped product teams of big tech companies unlock their user’s notions and helped triangulate the best path forward for the product. These insights have helped rapidly increase the DAU counts of many products. Our ability to create the right product telemetry and analytics We have not only built products but leveraged our vast experience in data analytics to build the right telemetry SGA can augment your initiatives across the analytics development and deployment tech stack. Data Application Development - Frontend Data Application Development - Backend ReactJS VueJS Advanced Analytics/Big Data Data Analytics AUGUST 2021 Data Engineering CRM Cloud Our data engineers and scientists are experienced in architecting and building scalable and fault-tolerant systems on cloud platforms where they work across various product modules. The way forward Instead of asking “how can we use data to make this better,” companies are now partnering with us and our seasoned data engineering experts and asks questions like; “how can our data and data systems shape the way we think about solving this problem.” We would equip it with the right telemetry to increase engagement through amazing customer experiences and build your brand. 3. We would leverage the power of our user and market research to identify and fill any gaps to ensure your product’s success. 2. Whatever you decide to build: 1. SGA can help you design and develop your MVP, and scale it up using the power of the cloud. 4

5. MVP: Bringing Your Product to Life About the Author MIHIR SAUDAGAR • VP, Solutions With a B.Tech in CS from IIT Kharagpur and having worked with companies like Amazon and Barclays in his previous roles, Mihir a seasoned analytics and product development professional with 15+ years of industry experience. He has worked with leading companies and clients across sectors (technology, e-commerce, healthcare and financial services) delivering analytics and building products. Disclaimer This document makes descriptive reference to trademarks that may be owned by others. The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such trademarks by SG Analytics (SGA) and is not intended to represent or get commercially benefited from it or imply the existence of an association between SGA and the lawful owners of such trademarks. Information regarding third-party products, services, and organizations was obtained from publicly available sources, and SGA cannot confirm the accuracy or reliability of such sources or information. Its inclusion does not imply an endorsement by or of any third party. Copyright © 2021 SG Analytics Pvt. Ltd. www.sganalytics.com GET IN TOUCH New York | Seattle | Austin | London | Zurich | Pune | Hyderabad 5